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Picture of democracy: Atatürk, Khomeini, Bin Laden and Lenin
Op-Ed
by ORHAN KEMAL CENGİZ
17 July 2009, Friday
I guess you read the news about an Ankara-based lawyer who is being prosecuted because of the resemblance of a photo on his wall to Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
The lawyer says that the man in the photo is his father, and it was taken when his father was young. The Ankara police, however, seem not to have been satisfied with this statement, and they sued the lawyer. Because of this photo, they think that the lawyer is a member of the PKK.
Prosecuting people because of the pictures they hang on their walls is not a new phenomenon in Turkey. During military interventions, this was an ordinary occurrence. Hanging a picture on your wall may have very different meanings in different countries. After visiting Iran and the US, I have come to the conclusion that we can take a good picture of democracy from the pictures on the walls. Does it seem weird? Well let me take you to Tehran and Washington, D.C.
Last Autumn I went to Iran for a holiday with two crazy female friends of mine. My time there was very interesting, but I will not go into the details, just snapshots. When we landed in “Imam Khomeini” Airport in Tehran, I felt very weird. I asked myself which airport we had departed from. The answer was Atatürk Airport. We took off from Atatürk Airport and landed in Imam Khomeini Airport. There was something similar. When I got Iranian money at the airport in exchange for US dollars, I got money that had Khomeini's picture it. I asked myself what money did I exchange in Turkey to get these dollars? The answer was money that had Atatürk's picture on it. Wherever I went in Iran, Khomeini's pictures followed me, just like in Turkey, where I have been followed by pictures and monuments of Atatürk my whole life. I started to think in a quite weird way. Turkey and Iran are supposed to be quite different countries; one is ultra “secular” and the other one ultra “religious,” so where do all these similarities come from?
After all, are Iran and Turkey very different countries? Okay, in Iran women have to cover their heads in public areas and in Turkey women should not cover their heads when entering public buildings, including universities. Are these really different approaches to women? Both countries are trying to regulate the dress code for women. If I were a woman in Iran, I would definitely do everything I could to ridicule this rule and indeed many women were doing so. Their heads were just half covered; they were resisting the oppression. If I were a female university student in Turkey, I would cover my head because I am so allergic to these tyrannical dress codes, and I really admire women who resist to this ridiculous ban on the headscarf at universities.
In Iran, Khomeini was looking into our eyes wherever we went, exactly as Atatürk does in Turkey.
Well, after my visit to Iran, I made some generalizations. It is very dangerous for a country to be ruled by people from a certain profession. Iran is ruled by religious clerics, Turkey by soldiers. These are professions, right? In both countries, the “real power” has been accumulated in the hands of people from a certain profession. My second observation was that if a country is ruled by “official ideology” there is no democracy in that country at all, and if there is no democracy, you see pictures of the same people wherever you go.
In the last week of June, I was in Washington, D.C. We, as Today's Zaman's columnists, were visiting Washington, D.C., to meet with officials, intellectuals, academicians and so on. During this visit, I was very impressed by two pictures in two different locations. The first one was the huge Osama bin Laden poster hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the newsroom of The Washington Post. I said to myself, “So hanging a picture in this country does not mean that you are sympathetic toward the particular person concerned.” An even the greater surprise came when we were visiting the Pentagon. While we were listening to a very interesting briefing on the Pentagon's view of Turkey and the region in general, I raised my head and came eye-to-eye with a picture of Lenin on the wall right across from me. I was really impressed with the confidence and the flexibility of the officers who hung this picture on the wall in this particular room and of course by the “system” which allows its officers to be that flexible. There were not any pictures of US presidents in that room, Lenin was there on his own.
Of course, after the Washington trip, I further developed my “picture-democracy” theory. In any given society, the flexibility on the variation of the pictures allowed in an official building equates to the capacity of embracing the differences of the society that the state belongs to.
Having made these observations, I offer a new understanding of democracy in any particular country. Look at the walls. If you see pictures of only one person, this particular country is not a democracy. It has an official ideology, and it is at war with some segments of the society. It has one picture on its walls, and it tries to create one type of citizen. It has one picture on its walls and is scared to death of differences. If you see pictures of different people on the walls of official and public buildings, then this country is a pluralistic society embracing differences, and it tends to see these differences as its richness. Look at the different countries you know; you will see no exceptions. OK, here we come to a new theory of democracy. The pictures on the walls represent a good picture of democracy in any given country, or the lack of it.
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Op-Ed
by ORHAN KEMAL CENGİZ
17 July 2009, Friday
I guess you read the news about an Ankara-based lawyer who is being prosecuted because of the resemblance of a photo on his wall to Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
The lawyer says that the man in the photo is his father, and it was taken when his father was young. The Ankara police, however, seem not to have been satisfied with this statement, and they sued the lawyer. Because of this photo, they think that the lawyer is a member of the PKK.
Prosecuting people because of the pictures they hang on their walls is not a new phenomenon in Turkey. During military interventions, this was an ordinary occurrence. Hanging a picture on your wall may have very different meanings in different countries. After visiting Iran and the US, I have come to the conclusion that we can take a good picture of democracy from the pictures on the walls. Does it seem weird? Well let me take you to Tehran and Washington, D.C.
Last Autumn I went to Iran for a holiday with two crazy female friends of mine. My time there was very interesting, but I will not go into the details, just snapshots. When we landed in “Imam Khomeini” Airport in Tehran, I felt very weird. I asked myself which airport we had departed from. The answer was Atatürk Airport. We took off from Atatürk Airport and landed in Imam Khomeini Airport. There was something similar. When I got Iranian money at the airport in exchange for US dollars, I got money that had Khomeini's picture it. I asked myself what money did I exchange in Turkey to get these dollars? The answer was money that had Atatürk's picture on it. Wherever I went in Iran, Khomeini's pictures followed me, just like in Turkey, where I have been followed by pictures and monuments of Atatürk my whole life. I started to think in a quite weird way. Turkey and Iran are supposed to be quite different countries; one is ultra “secular” and the other one ultra “religious,” so where do all these similarities come from?
After all, are Iran and Turkey very different countries? Okay, in Iran women have to cover their heads in public areas and in Turkey women should not cover their heads when entering public buildings, including universities. Are these really different approaches to women? Both countries are trying to regulate the dress code for women. If I were a woman in Iran, I would definitely do everything I could to ridicule this rule and indeed many women were doing so. Their heads were just half covered; they were resisting the oppression. If I were a female university student in Turkey, I would cover my head because I am so allergic to these tyrannical dress codes, and I really admire women who resist to this ridiculous ban on the headscarf at universities.
In Iran, Khomeini was looking into our eyes wherever we went, exactly as Atatürk does in Turkey.
Well, after my visit to Iran, I made some generalizations. It is very dangerous for a country to be ruled by people from a certain profession. Iran is ruled by religious clerics, Turkey by soldiers. These are professions, right? In both countries, the “real power” has been accumulated in the hands of people from a certain profession. My second observation was that if a country is ruled by “official ideology” there is no democracy in that country at all, and if there is no democracy, you see pictures of the same people wherever you go.
In the last week of June, I was in Washington, D.C. We, as Today's Zaman's columnists, were visiting Washington, D.C., to meet with officials, intellectuals, academicians and so on. During this visit, I was very impressed by two pictures in two different locations. The first one was the huge Osama bin Laden poster hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the newsroom of The Washington Post. I said to myself, “So hanging a picture in this country does not mean that you are sympathetic toward the particular person concerned.” An even the greater surprise came when we were visiting the Pentagon. While we were listening to a very interesting briefing on the Pentagon's view of Turkey and the region in general, I raised my head and came eye-to-eye with a picture of Lenin on the wall right across from me. I was really impressed with the confidence and the flexibility of the officers who hung this picture on the wall in this particular room and of course by the “system” which allows its officers to be that flexible. There were not any pictures of US presidents in that room, Lenin was there on his own.
Of course, after the Washington trip, I further developed my “picture-democracy” theory. In any given society, the flexibility on the variation of the pictures allowed in an official building equates to the capacity of embracing the differences of the society that the state belongs to.
Having made these observations, I offer a new understanding of democracy in any particular country. Look at the walls. If you see pictures of only one person, this particular country is not a democracy. It has an official ideology, and it is at war with some segments of the society. It has one picture on its walls, and it tries to create one type of citizen. It has one picture on its walls and is scared to death of differences. If you see pictures of different people on the walls of official and public buildings, then this country is a pluralistic society embracing differences, and it tends to see these differences as its richness. Look at the different countries you know; you will see no exceptions. OK, here we come to a new theory of democracy. The pictures on the walls represent a good picture of democracy in any given country, or the lack of it.
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